Talk:The Wicker House/@comment-4715955-20151114025404
It definitely channels the works of H P Lovecraft and the many Gothic authors he was emulating: while this makes the read a bit cumbersome (just as it does with the aforementioned authors), it does come off like a stylistic choice, rather than poorly-rendered purple prose trying to make the story sound more sophisticated than it is. The detailed history of the house and its owner helps establish the Lovecraftian style as well. And some lines made me laugh because they sounded so authentic. The best part is really the description of the horror in the house itself, which actually does build a sense of dread. The disappointment comes from the lack of an actual conclusion: with all this buildup, there's no clue as to what it was all about, which leaves the horror elements feeling a little bit arbitrary. It wouldn't be a tough fix to rewrite and expand the aftermath a bit, between Wicker's suicide and the final paragraph describing the narrator's trip to the house. That final paragraph is probably the weakest part of the whole thing. It's obvious what effect you're going for, but the execution just doesn't sit quite right, for two reasons: first, the story up to this point has given an epistolary vibe (like Dracula or Call of Cthulhu), as if the narrator is writing a testimonial of some sort to document his part in the Wicker House's history. But the final paragraph makes it clear that nothing is actually being written or spoken: the first-person narration is simply an inner monologue directed at no one, an inconsistency in style which really hurts the story in the long run. There's nobody around to hear or read the story, which is a necessary part of writing epistolary fiction. Call of Cthulhu was written by the narrator as evidence of a world-threatening plot, documented because his life was in danger. Dracula was a series of documents compiled for the same reason: somebody in-universe had a purpose for writing each document, and someone in-universe is reading those documents. Keeping this in mind makes any epistolary work much more believable and satisfying. Even the Rime of the Ancient Mariner was being narrated to another character as a cautionary tale. Second, the abruptness of the ending works against the work as well. Since we have no idea what the nature of the threat is, and no idea why the narrator even wants to investigate the house, we're left with an anticlimax that leaves too much to the imagination. Letting the reader draw his/her own conclusions is fine, but they still need to know the possibilities. Lady Wicker could be anything, and is therefore nothing in particular, which robs her of her fright factor. Still a pretty solid read. I would continue working on it and expand it a bit, maybe tell anyone offering to do a youtube reading to hold off on this one while you revisit it. With a bit more work it could be worthy of a spotlight.